The Volokh Conspiracy

I know that the world (at least the VC world) is sharply divided into opposing camps on all matters soccer-related, but we should put aside our differences and gather together at our favorite watering-holes tomorrow (Wednesday — 230 PM EDT, rebroadcast at 8 PM EDT on Fox Soccer Channel) for a match that should be a real beauty (and a chance for the ‘phobes to see what it is that gets real soccer fans so passionate about the game). Arsenal FC v. FCB Barcelona, quarter-finals of the European Champions League.

The ECL is far and away the most prestigious (and the best, and the most-watched) club soccer tournament of all (eclipsed only by the battle of the national teams in the World Cup). It’s a season-long tournament, involving the teams that finished at the top of their respective national leagues the previous year (so, e.g., it starts out with the top four teams from the English Premier League in 2008-09 [Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool], the top three from Spain [Barcelona, Real Madrid, Sevilla], France, Germany, etc.) leading up to a one-match Final at the end of May (this year in Madrid) that is always the most-watched soccer match of the year, world-wide. The level of play is generally astonishingly high in all matches – but the Arsenal-Barcelona pairing in this year’s quarter-finals should be particularly delicious. By common consensus, of all the thousands upon thousands of professional soccer teams out there on this earth, these are the two that play the most beautiful soccer of all. Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder — but most neutral fans, whomever they may be rooting for in the competition, would have to agree that no teams can match these two in sheer elegance and grace when they’re on their game.

Describing what is “beautiful” about soccer is no easier than describing what it beautiful in music or painting — but it’s mostly about the intricacy and delicacy of their passing and the complexity of their improvisational moves. For instance, virtually all teams, even at the very highest level, will, when the opponents are attacking and one of the defenders can get his foot on the ball, will simply whack it, hard, up the field to quell the danger. If you watch tomorrow, you won’t see that — or at least, you won’t see it very often. The Barcelona defenders, in particular, are always looking for the outlet pass to a teammate, always looking to start some intricate upfield move. “Hit and hope,” which characterizes the play of even some really good teams, just isn’t in their repertoire. And when they’re attacking the goal – well, you just have to watch. It’s a thing of real beauty.

The atmosphere tomorrow should be white hot at the Emirates stadium (Arsenal’s home ground – the “return leg” is next week in Barcelona). [One other note for neophytes: to determine which team moves on to the next round, the ECL uses a scoring system that looks first to the "aggregate" over the two matches. If the teams are tied on aggregate, the first tie-breaker is "away goals" - the number of goals scored on the opponent's pitch. It has all sorts of interesting implications for strategy, especially in the second of the two games. But it means, for instance, that a 1-1 draw, say, would be a better result for Barcelona than for Arsenal, because of that "away goal."]

Every once in a while in sports, someone performs at such an incredibly high level that s/he simply elevates him/herself far, far above the crowd of even the most talented competitors — Gretzky at his peak, Babe Ruth, Tiger Woods. At the moment (for those of you who can tear yourself away from March Madness), it’s Lionel Messi, the Argentine forward who plays his club soccer for the best club in the world, FC Barcelona. Messi, all of 22 years old, has had a week that has no parallel in recent soccer history — eight goals in his last three games. [For those of you who don’t follow soccer closely, you should know that eight goals is a pretty decent season for soccer players at the highest level, and a “strike rate” of one goal every two games is considered world-class). It’s not like he’s been playing against second-rate opposition, either — three goals against Valencia, the third place team in Spain, two goals in the European Champions League against Stuttgart, three goals today against Real Zaragoza in La Liga. And every goal has been a true beauty, a real masterpiece of skill and creativity — the Valencia goals are here, and the Stuttgart goals are here. Worth a look — they’re things of beauty. If we’re all lucky, Diego Maradona, coach of the Argentina national team who’s making something of a mess out of, potentially, one of the great teams in the world, will figure out how to get Messi involved in the offense at the world cup, and we can all enjoy his magic on the biggest stage of all.

Nate Silver — the fellow who built FiveThirtyEight.com into one of the more successful and sophisticated predictive electoral sites on the Web, and who was remarkably prescient in his electoral vote predictions in the 2008 Presidential election — has now cast his net over more profound and important prey: the world of international soccer. As soccer fans are well aware, the “official” rankings of the world’s national teams, prepared by FIFA, are, and have always been, absurd — widely discounted and often derided by serious fans everywhere. [A few years back, for example, the US team was ranked fourth (!!) in the world – and the current FIFA rankings have such oddities as Croatia at #8, USA at #11, and Switzerland at #13). Working with espn.com, Silver has devised the “Soccer Power Index” as a new predictive tool (just ahead, of course, of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa). Soccer’s a tough game to handicap in the best of circumstances, and I haven’t had much of a chance to study Silver’s lengthy explanations of his new algorithms – but Silver’s track record is too good to ignore, and if I were a betting man I’d certainly want to take a good long look at what he’s come up with.